Amazing Pluto Shines in Best Close-Up Views Yet

This is the most detailed view of Pluto's terrain you'll see for a very long time. This mosaic strip - extending across the hemisphere that faced the New Horizons spacecraft as it flew past Pluto on July 14, 2015 - now includes all of the highest-resolution images taken by the NASA probe.JHUAPL/SwRI / NASA

Pluto's exotic and incredibly varied landscapes dazzle in the sharpest views of the dwarf planet released to date.

The images, which feature a resolution of about 260 feet per pixel, were captured by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft during its epic flyby of Pluto on July 14, 2015. Mission team members have stitched the photos into a high-resolution mosaic and used them to create a stunning new video of Pluto that highlights the dwarf planet's towering water-ice mountains and nitrogen glaciers, among other exotic features.

"This new image product is just magnetic," Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement Friday (May 27). "It makes me want to go back on another mission to Pluto and get high-resolution images like these across the entire surface."

This is the most detailed view of Pluto's terrain you'll see for a very long time. This mosaic strip - extending across the hemisphere that faced the New Horizons spacecraft as it flew past Pluto on July 14, 2015 - now includes all of the highest-resolution images taken by the NASA probe.JHUAPL/SwRI / NASA

The mosaic covers a long, roughly 50-mile-wide strip of the "encounter hemisphere" — the face of the dwarf planet that New Horizons saw during its historic flyby.

New Horizons captured the images from a distance of about 9,850 miles on July 14, 23 minutes before the probe's closest approach to Pluto (which brought it to within 7,800 miles of the dwarf planet's surface).

Though the encounter took place more than 10 months ago, New Horizons is still beaming flyby data home, and likely won't be done doing so until this coming fall, mission team members have said.